


Babies

by Sionnan



Category: Pacific Rim (2013)
Genre: Drifiting, Gen, Kaiju
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-09-27
Updated: 2013-09-27
Packaged: 2017-12-27 18:12:40
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,503
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/982056
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sionnan/pseuds/Sionnan
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Hermann and Newt come to an unpleasant and striking realization about the similarities between human adaptive responses to lethal danger and infant kaiju in utero development. </p><p>Or: why going fetal in the face of a rampaging kaiju saved Newt in more ways than one.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Babies

It was sometime after their second drift, in the waiting period before the Pan Pacific Defense Corps made the ultimate decision of which divisions, units, sectors, and personnel were going to be cut loose, and which were going to be retained. Of course, the support units were among the last to go, with the science division drifting uncertainly in a bureaucratic limbo. 

For once, with no horrific deadline looming over their shoulders, the air in the lab felt relaxed, almost leisurely. Newt wasn't blasting music to keep himself alert and focused, and Gottlieb wasn't scribbling furiously on the board. And aside for a quiet morning greeting, they had hardly said a word to each other for the past few hours they had been together.

Gottlieb sat at one of his ancient, clunky boxes of a computer, watching a simulation play out in an endless loop on his screen.

"You went fetal." Gottlieb's voice was abrupt, but thoughtful, as though he had come to an important conclusion about something and was sure Newt would pick up on it.

The biologist looked up from analyzing some blood slides, glasses perched in his hair. "Huh?" He reached up to rub his face.

Slightly impatiently, Gottlieb sat back from his screen. "When you were chased by the baby kaiju--" he sneered slightly, clearly unhappy at using such emotionally laden words to label what was essentially hellspawn from another dimension, "When you couldn't run or crawl anymore, you curled up in the fetal position." 

"Uh." Newt was rather surprised by this bizarre turn of conversation, but wasn't going to actively discourage it. Nor did he ask Hermann how he knew that, since he assumed that one of the most frightening moments of his life were, yeah, probably going to be conveyed in their Drift. "Yeah, I guess I did. Kinda in the heat of the moment and every-"

Gottlieb waved him off, tisking impatiently. "Yes yes, I know, but that's not what I'm saying. It's something between you and the--"

Newt's mouth dropped, and his eyes widened. "Kaiju. Oh my God." His hands flew up to his head, skewing his glasses. "Oh my God! Holy shit, Herman!"

A slow smile, like a wan winter sun cresting at dawn, began to bloom on Gottlieb's face, as he knew that Newt had caught on to his largely instinctual line of thought. Truth be told, he had honestly missed these insane scheming sessions, marrying theory with evidence, the two scientists volleying ideas back and forth.

"They gestated in the womb of the kaiju, like mammals, not like birds, or shit not even like reptiles. But why? Why? Is it an attachment--" he stopped himself, eyes racing over thoughts flashing by in his head. "It is! It's an attachment thing, holy shit, it's so that the kaiju would bond to each other during gestation and after birth! The baby kaiju would still have had significant functional impairments after birth, so the mother would have had to take care of it--"

Fetal position. Newt, on the rubble-strewn ground, his cried high pitched, short, and sharp, sounding a childlike distress call. The giant beast sighed to a rest just beyond him, as though deliberately, carefully, not reaching--

Hivemind. A baby "born" just moments after its' mother's death, the long, peaceful memory of suspension and slumber and the rhythm of it's mother's heart, curled up deep inside her mammoth body--

Hungerfearpainpanic

Newt, telegraphing infancy, helplessness, and it had collapsed mere meters beyond him. The long tongue of Otachi probing, discovering, exploring, and she could have snatched him up in any one of those luminescent tentacles, scooped him into her maw, but she turned to face the real threat, didn't even bother with Newt--

\--because he was one of them. 

\--the Precursors studied earth. Learned how successful a species we had become. Remarked on our unusual biological quirks, and then adapted and copied and released versions that would do best on Earth--

Fetal position. Fearfearpainpanic Newt was back to infancy with no one to help him, no one to save him, and the kaiju baby's brain, of course attached to Newt since his first Drift, overloaded with reflected emotions, and it swallowed the threat, and collapsed just beyond him, again. Both fetal, both helpless, both moments from death.

Newt didn't realize he had been crying, didn't even realize he had gone so far away, until he felt a different sensation jerking him out of his thoughts and recollections. Hermann was by him now, having pulled up a lab stool, and was quietly dabbing blood from Newt's nose and tears from his face, waiting for him to come back. He looked at Hermann, and Hermann looked at him sadly, and Newt knew all too well that the mathematician could read the devastation on Newt's face at having been the kaiju baby, its emotional memory banks feeding into Newt's horror and terror at it all.

For a flash of a second, it went through his head that it really wouldn't be cool if he started crying like a small child right then. 

But Hermann, expectant father, and somehow more patient man after the Drift and now that the end of the world was a bygone thing, just wiped a bit more blood from Newt's nose, and offered him a small pat on the knee--

\--and the unselfconscious donation of comfort, of an almost parental comfort, was the catalyst for Newt's sharp sobs. His chin down on his chest, face so screwed up that it hurt, cries so loud they banged off the walls of the lab, as Newt finally cried out his and the baby kaiju's pain of that night. 

Recognition in the face of the alien, in face of something so other, was too painful to bear. Something so familiar, nestled deep in the brain of something from another world, something so potent that two species shared an almost identical instinctual response. 

-i'malone-i'mdying-mothercan'tsaveme

He can hear his own cries, high and sharp, utter distress, and grief--

Newt was aware that he was being rocked-- being cradled-- by a pair of rather thin, but very strong arms, one curled around his body, and the other pressing his head to a bony chest covered by layers of wool and cotton.

He could hear Herman's heartbeat.

Newt instantly stilled, and listened.

It was dim, but thunderous, and encompassing, and was all peace. 

Hermann kept rocking him, hushing something in German that sounds like he's crying himself, and Newt let out an exhausted breath, and relaxed into the comfort. 

Hermann's words have trickled into silence, but he kept rocking Newt like it was all he could remember to do, and pieces of the world come back to Newt slowly. He realized there was a good deal of blood on Hermann's sweater sleeve, and pantsleg, and he guessed that it was his own blood. He fetched a long, shaky sigh, and Hermann's rocking slowed.

After a moment of residual movement, they were quiet on the floor together, Hermann still wrapped protectively around Newt. Newt realized that Hermann must have felt the baby's fear and distress during the Drift, must have felt it resonate with him as Newt mimicked a small child's distress in memory of the whole thing.

He wondered if this was cathartic for Hermann, or further traumatizing, and felt a stab of concern that dwindled into apathy after the torrent of emotions. After a second, he realized that the ever practical engineer was checking his vital signs, pulse rate, pupil dilation, skin temperature, puffing slightly all the while as he calmed down himself. 

"Newton," and his voice was somewhat hoarse. Newt wondered why, and then distantly remembered Hermann screaming at him over his own wild sobbing, trying to figure out what was the matter, until he just resorted to grabbing Newt in his arms and holding him. Newt blinked at him slowly, still riding out the emotional high with the anchor Hermann had offered. 

Hermann sighed, a note of resignation there. "Newton, we have to get you checked up by medical. I think you've just hemorrhaged, and you need what little left you have of your brain." A wry smile quirked at the corners of his thin mouth, and Newt returned it full force. "And," he continued, "we need to be sure that all of this phantom residual synaptic activity isn't going to give you epilepsy." And he frowned, concerned, at Newt.

Newt, for his part, just coughed a little bit. Through a combination of gravity and Hermann squirming around, he was now laying so that his shoulders and head were still mostly propped against Hermann's skinny chest and stomach, lower back and legs cold on the floor. He could still hear Hermann's heartbeat. And it's enough to banish the swell of clamoring emotions from that night back under the dam in his brain. Finally, he responds, his voice cracked and high, "Kay."

Hermann gave him a small squeeze, and then started righting his limbs to get them both up.


End file.
